Love Drones

by Noam Dorr

In Love Drones, Noam Dorr explores the troubling relationship between our desire for intimacy and the world of military action, state violence, and intelligence surveillance. Born and raised on a kibbutz in Israel, Dorr served a compulsory military term as an intelligence analyst, tapped for his skill with translation. This is reflected in the book with form-bending interwoven essays that retrace the fragments of a bomb that never explodes, grenades concealed as oranges, and drones that are simultaneously sound, insect, and lethal aircraft―essays searching for human connection within a landscape of violent conflict. It is a deeply intimate and unsettling book.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Poetry

168 pages, Paperback

First published July 2, 2019

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really did not enjoy this book. I bought it thinking it was a book of poems, it's apparently a book of (award-winning??) essays. I don't get it. I think the experimental format detracts from what could be poignant and striking content; there are stories here, but they are not told (as) well (as I feel they could be).
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I find a lot of modern writing to be more just whining about things the authors have been through in their lives, and that's what this feels like to me. There is little application to anything outside of the writer's experience, and thus little reason for readers to feel engaged, involved, etc. It feels superficial and unnecessarily obfuscating while attempting to inject some type of agenda (not necessarily political) into the reader.
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I think--and I'm speaking about more than just this book--that maybe if writers stopped trying to pretend they weren't simply "whining" about things, the issues they struggle with would be more palatable in the sense that more readers could relate (although apparently they do anyway judging by the reviews here). I see this also in music lately (e.g. Bon Iver's latest works); it's an endemic of artists not being able to get outside of their own heads.
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Everyone's been through something, right? That's a given; but how do we express that in a way that's meaningful? It can never (I believe) be universal, but maybe it can get close, and Dorr has lost me entirely on this one, which is unfortunate because the themes here have a lot of potential to be interwoven and interesting, but I find myself exploring one fragment, then moving to another fragment, wishing I was back at the previous one.
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Two stars because it is well-crafted (some small typos, whatever), but the writing feels cloying at times, pompous at others, even inconsequential.
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I don't know, maybe I'm just a hater?

[Joe Sacksteder · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is amazing. Long review hopefully forthcoming...

[Spencer Reynolds · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read for our increasingly automated and bureaucratic relationship to intimacy, but the ideas here are always relevant in the broader sense, and it plays with form in a way that elevates the ideas at play. Only misses a star because I would have liked Dorr to go more in depth about modern intimacy. Felt like there was something missing in the exploration of that theme.

[Diana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recommended by Michael Walden (student rabbi). Written in English (no translator noted on the book) even though the author is Israeli, the book relies heavily on visual presentation as well as the text itself. For example, the author talks about a pinhole camera and then he uses a square with a dot in the center of the square to represent the camera on a page by itself. The subsequent page has a faint image in the same square and text overlaid on the image. OR, there are pages where the text runs normally down the left page and then continues on the right page. And then later there is a whole section where the text starts on the left page and continues across the seam to continue on the facing page.

The author is very clever in terms of the internal references that he employs. There are sketches throughout that reinforce or counter the idea in the text. There are puns that work in English! This would be a good book to discuss with another reader b/c I'm positive that I've missed some of the truly interesting artifacts used in the text.

[meg (the.hidden.colophon) · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was given to me by my mentor because Noam Dorr was an assistant professor at my university and my mentor wanted me to get a feel for his work. Unfortunately, my work study lost funding because the state government doesn’t believe humanities programs deserve funding, and Dorr left the university, so this book got shelved for a couple of years.

Returning to it now, perhaps I’m glad I didn’t read it while Dorr was here, because I really didn’t enjoy it. My mentor pointed out the experimental form of the work as a selling point to me, but I felt as if the form was only a device to justify large leaps in the logical pattern of the narrative. I thought the work did a great job of making a strong donut of ideas but neglected to connect in the center.

Now, Dorr has received several awards and is a full-time professor, and I’m just a student, so he’s probably right.

[Neva · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars
A prose/essay book of dual citizenship, love, war, and a bomb made out of an orange. I really enjoyed the author’s perspective and learning about these snippets of his life. The main reason I chose 3.5 stars is due to the formatting of the middle section, which I found really off putting and almost made me give up on the book. But if reading across 2 pages doesn’t bother you then you’ll definitely give this a higher rating than me.

[Emma McCoy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Definitely experimental (but I love that). Powerful usage of imagery and interwoven story